The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 18 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Last week brought us the fiasco of Matt Gaetz for attorney general. Now Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is running into serious trouble as well. The Washington Post reports that Hegseth paid a woman who claimed he sexually assaulted her as part of a nondisclosure agreement with her, though Hegseth insists the encounter was consensual.

This and other revelations about Hegseth that we’ll talk about suggests we’re looking at another personnel fiasco for Trump, with one source even describing internal frustration over the failure to vet Hegseth in advance. Are things getting out of control for Trump already? And what does that portend about what lies ahead? Today, we’re talking about all this with Rick Wilson, the leading NeverTrump strategist who’s launching a new effort to conduct opposition research on Trump and his most prominent allies. Rick, great to have you back on.

Rick Wilson: Greg, great to be with you.

Sargent: Pete Hegseth paid an undisclosed amount to this woman who filed a complaint against him with authorities alleging sexual assault back in 2017. Hegseth denies it but entered into the NDA because he feared the allegations would cost him his job at Fox News. Hegseth was already under fire, Rick, because of his lack of managerial experience, anger at the Pentagon over the pick, and his grotesque claim that women in combat are less capable than men, which denigrates their heroism. What do you make of these latest revelations now?

Wilson: Look, Pete Hegseth is a guy who is a definitional lightweight. He is not a serious person. This is not a guy who you would pick to, as I like to say, run a Waffle House, much less run the Department of Defense. DoD is an enormously complex and difficult situation to manage on the best possible day. A guy like Hegseth who does not have managerial or experience beyond reading a teleprompter on Fox. And yes, I will grant you, he served in the national guard. He ran a platoon of 28 men. OK, God bless you. That’s great. That’s about like running a McDonald’s in terms of the number of the head count. I’m not denigrating his service, but it is most certainly not the same level of engagement that you would think you would need.

If you’re picking somebody to run a $980 billion a year operation and picking someone who is going to be at the center of enormously consequential policy decisions about our national defense, about our coming confrontations with places like Iran and China—for all that the Republicans always play this role of we’re the ones for national defense, the ones who are serious about this, these are fundamentally unserious choices they’ve been making so far. And that’s Matt Gaetz, that’s Tulsi Gabbard, all of these people they’ve chosen so far have been either dangerous or unqualified or some combination of both.

Sargent: Yeah, you’re talking here about a range of institutions that are all about supposedly, anyway, law and order and national security and national intelligence. These are not just on serious picks; these are actively destructive ones. They almost seem like who you would pick if you were trying to harm these institutions, doesn’t it?

Wilson: And look, let’s be very clear. Trump is trying to harm these institutions. Donald Trump does want to destroy these institutions. He believes that they are in opposition to him in some capacity or another. And he may be right in some of these cases because they believe in these things called the Constitution and the rule of law and all the other boring backbone of America type things that Trump sees as obstacles to his success and in reshaping America in his image, which is, as we all know, authoritarian, aggressively autocratic, oppressive, all of these things. None of the reasons here that Trump has such surprise anyone. They’re very explicable. They’re grotesque, but they’re explicable.

Sargent: Rick, I got to say, when you’re on here, you just make me want to rant. I don’t know what it is about you, man, but I’m going to rant for a second. The Times had a headline the other day that said something like Trump is assaulting the deep state because he sees this as an obstacle. The implication was that he’s taking on these elite sclerotic institutions that are getting in the way of the people’s will. And he’s really going to remake them. Things like our intelligence services and DOJ. The reason Trump hates them is because they tried to hold him accountable for his malfeasance, not because he thinks in any way about what the national interest requires in this situation.

Wilson: Correct. That’s exactly right, Greg. He does not believe that he has a fundamental disregard and disrespect for institutional norms and guardrails. All those things we talked about in the first administration where people said, The center will hold, no problem. We all know, at the end........

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